BEHIND THE PASS RATE
Matric results, which ignore the many who don’t succeed as well asthose who drop out before exams are written, are a poor indicator of the overall health of the education system
Many of SA’S schools are in deep crisis. Teaching posts are sold for money, two-thirds of provincial departments are under siege by teaching unions and literacy levels are alarmingly low.
Amid all this the matrics of 2017 have emerged as heroes, with a 75% pass rate. But, says Stellenbosch University’s Prof Jonathan Jansen in a Facebook post, it is the casualties of SA’S education system, rather than its survivors, who tell a more compelling story.
“Any government that prides itself on the few who succeed in school and ignores the many who don’t, has clearly lost its moral bearings,” he wrote last week after basic education minister Angie Motshekga lauded the achievements of last year’s matrics.
She conceded that “we have yet to cross our own Rubicon” in providing pupils with quality education, but failed to explain why 15% of the 629,155 pupils who started the matric year did not write their final exams.
More than half of the pupils registered in the schooling system in grade 1 did not reach grade 12. And in several provinces where improved pass rates were recorded, fewer pupils participated, suggesting the final results had been inflated by “culling” or gate-keeping of pupils who were not expected to pass.
Sarah Gravett, dean of the faculty of education at the University of Johannesburg, also notes the high number of drop-outs, saying too much is made of the matric results when these are in fact a poor indicator of the overall health of the education system.
Though a crude measurement, a better indicator is the “throughput pass rate”, says Nic Spaull, a senior researcher in the economics department at Stellenbosch University. In a blog post, Spaull argues that when the number of passes is divided by the number of pupils who enrolled in grade 10 or grade 2, rather than by those who took the final exams, the pass rate is in decline.
Taking into account drop-outs, the Free State’s pass rate falls and the Western Cape and Gauteng emerge as the leaders.
But in seeking a more accurate understanding of the state of education there are other helpful indicators. The most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) report, for example, shows that the system has a miserable literacy rate.
The assessment showed that 78% of grade 4 pupils in 2016 could not read for meaning in any language and that there is little correlation between the literacy levels of pupils and the qualifications and work experience of their teachers, says Bailey Thomson, head of schools at Spark Schools.
The report says 93% of teachers of the assessed pupils had a tertiary qualification and 40% had more than 20 years’ teaching experience. It is hard to understand why so many of the pupils of such experienced, qualified teachers could not read.
“That’s a pretty devastating assessment of teacher-preparation institutions in SA,” she says. “In fact the recommendation in the University of Pretoria’s analysis of the Pirls report was that [the education department] needs to focus on recruiting less-experienced teachers and training them in-house.”
Basil Manuel, president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA, says teachers graduating from universities are “teaching maths the same way that they are teaching history” because their training in teaching methodology “is all wrong”.
The shortcomings of the teaching profession are not limited to poor training, with questionable ethics frequently flagged in news reports.
“You can’t underestimate the importance of a teacher-recruiting system that focuses on core values,” Thomson says.
This brings to mind the findings of a ministerial task team appointed by Motshekga to probe allegations in the “jobs for cash” scandal. The Volmink report found the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union had effectively taken over recruitment in six provinces and forced members to be unionists first, professionals second.
It is perhaps no surprise that literacy levels are floundering and that, according to a paper in 2015 by Spaull and Hamsa Venkat, 79% of grade 6 maths teachers could not pass the maths tests for which they were supposed to be preparing their pupils.
Brahm Fleisch, associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s school of education, suggested teachers themselves are not the problem — coupled with inadequate training, they are not armed with the correct reading resources to teach literacy.
“We know children need to be reading [books] that are pitched at the correct level but many of the schools never got the reading sets they needed to ensure the progress of learners.”
Research clearly points to the root of the problem — lack of the correct resources and buy-in from education stakeholders. However, Fleisch expects literacy levels to lift in the next round of Pirls results in 2021.
What it means: The education system needs serious intervention if it is to get close to correcting its many faults